Racism Review

Not So Post-Racial After All

So, while white liberals like Chris Matthews blather on about how post-racial we all are now with a black president, other folks are not so post-racial after all. Allen McDuffee sent me this disturbing image circulating via a Facebook group dedicated to denigrating Haitians and the earthquake relief effort. While it appears that Facebook has pulled the group once already for violating the Terms of Service (TOS), the group is back and loudly proclaiming its alleged protection under the First Amendment and threatening to contact the ACLU to defend it.

There is no constitutionally protecting right to have a racist group on Facebook. And, given the threat to the president implied by the image linked above, I’m surprised that those who are generating such an image are not under investigation by the Secret Service.

As I’ve said here before, it’s certainly possible to disagree with the policies of President Obama and not be a racist, there is something about linking the threat to Obama with the vitriolic hatred of Haitian people which suggests not only a criticism of Obama’s presidency, or lack of empathy for earthquake victims but a deep well of racist antipathy as well. I guess we’re not so post-racial after all.

Comments

It is significant just how widespread the lynching type imagery is among whites, including hangman’s nooses in dorms and workplaces by the carloads, Jena-type incidents, cartoons, jokes, and images on web pages by an array of white supremacists and other racists. The 6,000 lynchings of black men, women, and children in this country since the 1860s should have been enough to prove the depth and brutality and shame of white racial violence without celebrating that white violence again and again still daily in this symbolic way…. Why are there so few whites attacking this racist imagery, its underlying framing and extreme racist motivation? It is not enough just to remove it from Facebook.

Not enough white people take this seriously. When Reid says Obama could win because he’s light-skinned and doesn’t have a negro-dialect, and white folks upset. Chris Matthews forgets the president is black, and white folks get upset. Not that black folks don’t find it offensive. I find it annoying. But as aggrevating as comments like those can be, we’re much more disturbed by noose imagery. Death threats.

On the contrary, it seems when it comes to noose imagery and death threats, white people wanna downplay it and brush it aside.

I don’t know if it’s because their lives aren’t at stake, or that their jobs aren’t at stake. But it’s just another manifestation of white supremacy that the white mainstream gets to decide what gets our attention and what doesn’t, that the white mainstream gets to tell us what’s offensive and threatening and what isn’t. You can’t get much more pompous than that.

@No1KState, you’re likely right about whites not caring much about this crap because they’re not threatened by it personally. In my dissertation interviews of white college students the Jewish respondents were more likely to express disapproval of racist jokes than the others, while they often mentioned personal experiences (or those of relatives) who had experienced racism firsthand.